Hi Yves - back in 2017 you sent a patch to sort keys in automake: https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=25629 Attached is a patch that I believe fixes any remaining uses of unsorted keys.
I've now applied this, with the exception of a) the cases that had already been done in the meantime, b) gendocs.sh and gitlog-to-changelog, which are maintained in gnulib (I forwarded the changes there and they have been applied), and c) help2man, which is maintained separately; I would have forwarded that change to bug-help2...@gnu.org except that as far as I can see this is a case where truly no sorting is needed. It's purely an internal assignment: --- a/doc/help2man +++ b/doc/help2man @@ -204,7 +204,7 @@ while (@opt_include) # Compress trailing blank lines. for my $hash (\(%include, %append)) { - for (keys %$hash) { $hash->{$_} =~ s/\n+$/\n/ } + for (sort keys %$hash) { $hash->{$_} =~ s/\n+$/\n/ } } sub get_option_value; So I'm closing the bug. Belated thanks for the contribution. (And Sam, thanks for unearthing this and bringing it up again.) Happy hashing, karl